Show HN: Yoleo – A Beautiful RSS Reader

by jamiebikies • 13 years ago

269 184 13 years ago

kposehn• 13 years ago

I like the look of it. However, before I give you access to my data some more information on how it works, who you are, why I should use it, etc. would be nice.

That said, I hope you this gets traction. We need more options.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Hey there, good questions! I'm a developer in Toronto, Canada and I love to ride bikes and write code. I work at a place called Unspace (http://unspace.ca/team), I'm the third one down (Jamie Gilgen).

Yoleo is a self funded project. I would like to keep it that way if I can. That's why donations are very welcome. I do however offer Yoleo up for free for those who are unable to pay. Yoleo is written in Ember, and is backed by Rails.

I'm really into Ember, and helped out out by teaching a portion of the most recent Embergarten (http://unspace.ca/embergarten/) here in Toronto.

The import is a simple one click import, I've directly integrated with Googles Reader API.

You should use it....because it's good?

Hope that helps!

aroch• 13 years ago

Please force SSL/TLS on the accounts page if not everywhere (should be everywhere)...You're currently sending Stripe payments over http

hanifvirani• 13 years ago

Nice to see someone from Toronto. Good luck with the project!

_bfhp• 13 years ago

I agree; a bets minimal option set would be the ones most used on G Reader as far as I can tell:

* Option to hide any unread feeds on sidebar (totally essential for me) * Unread count on feeds with new items * Ability to edit and rename folders

If any of these are there already.. I can't find em. Thanks for this great-working and great-looking site though!

ryanisinallofus2• 13 years ago

Looks beautiful, interesting pay model. Seems like enough people still use RSS readers...

Just 2 feature requests:

1.) Let us change the one color :) That red is pretty, but distracts from the content. Dustin Curtis got this right on his minimalist design in that the one-color isn't used in the actual content.

2.) Responsive design: Iv'e been removing apps from my phone for weeks and I couldn't be happier. Far less annoying update badges. Also, as something that is open all the time it would be great to keep it in a smaller window than the current design allows.

Great work!

dabeeeenster• 13 years ago

Agree - the red is way too much.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

We can tone down the red if enough people think it's jarring, I love this kind of feedback!

alex_doom2• 13 years ago

Well I think the color works really well. Sparse whitespace punctuated with red. It's clearly well though out. And I like it.

tomdale• 13 years ago

Looks like it's written in Ember.js—nice!

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Indeed!

saurabhnanda3• 13 years ago

Firing up the the Angular vs Ember debate again here. What's your take?

ilSignorCarlo• 13 years ago

It would be nice the possibility to import also from other sources other than Google. At this point many people stopped updating their feed on Google Reader.

geekam• 13 years ago

Agreed. I have my feeds in Newsblur now.

akurtzhs• 13 years ago

Yeah, I moved to self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS after Bloglines went down. OPML import would be great. On the flip side, OPML export is also a requirement for me - I don't want to re-enter all of my feeds.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

OPML import is on its way :)

StavrosK• 13 years ago

Clever name! I pressed "import" and it claims to be importing my feeds from Google Reader, even though I never gave it a password or feed or connected through Google. I wonder how that works...

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

You're in a queue, you are going to be redirected to auth as soon as your turn is up. There are a bunch of people trying to import at the moment.

sprouticus• 13 years ago

This looks pretty fantastic. I've been searching for a good browser option outside of Feedly, which just doesn't do it for me. I agree that more information about the product and the people behind it would be nice, however, I'm still eagerly signing up when I get a chance today. :)

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Some more info about me was posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5826803

h0w412d2• 13 years ago

Is there an API?

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Yep, but it's not public yet.

psycr3• 13 years ago

Looks like Active Model Serializers under the hood? Looks good from what I can see.

h0w412d2• 13 years ago

Is a website, is beautiful, is easy to use, has an API. You've hit on the first three, so when the API becomes public, I am so using this.

Are you hosting this yourself? Do you expect $9/year members to adequate cover the costs? I'd totally be willing to pay more if it means I don't have to suffer through another shutdown.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Just so you all know, the import queue is currently building up rather quickly, so imports might take a little while.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

theoldreader.com just chokes on my 100 feed list, and feedly has just been flaky for me. Here's to hoping this works well with a mobile interface!

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

The mobile interface isn't responsive yet. I have users with over 400 feeds, so it should be all good!

tuzemec• 13 years ago

So far, so good. But the importing from google reader is hella slow. Guess a lot of people are trying it out right now.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Yep, the importer is working away on the queue.

psycr3• 13 years ago

Hey Jamie - it'd be great if adding a subscription was a little more intelligent re: RSS url discovery. For example, I initially entered `daringfireball.net` and got a URL misformatted error. I subsequently tried prepending http:// - when really I needed to include a fully qualified path to the feed in the first place.

Otherwise, happy to import from Reader and check this out. I like that it feels light and easy to use.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

You should be able to enter a bare url. I looked into it and daringfireball.net doesn't provide a rel="alternate" for their rss feed so my little feed discovery ditty won't work for them.

dpcx• 13 years ago

They do have <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="/index.xml" /> though, so you might want to check for that as well.

btipling2• 13 years ago

Instead of calling it a donation, just call it the 'pro' version and add like a supporter badge on the header or let them do something silly like change the color of their header like on HN. Will probably get more funds that way and won't get cynical people to roll their eyes at questionable use of the word 'donation' whether it is or not.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

I was calling it a donation, because I do offer the service for free.

I wanted to offer the service to people that might not be able to afford it, and not have them punished by having fewer features.

mseebach• 13 years ago

That's the point - the "pro" version only gives you a silly, feel-good feature, but it (might) increase revenue when people feel they're actually getting something.

ramayac• 13 years ago

"I wanted to offer the service to people that might not be able to afford it, and not have them punished by having fewer features."

That's neat, why don't consider some kind of sponsorship program? A user that can pay, can sponsor one or two more users who can't, that would be nice :)

btipling2• 13 years ago

It's difficult to scale an RSS reader as you could quickly start having to crawl orders of magnitude number of feeds more than you are now as you get more users, if power users like your thing. I know because I worked at Bloglines. You're either going to need money or you will shut it down eventually.

ANTSANTS• 13 years ago

Alternatively, keep calling it a donation and let people donate whatever they want, with $9 as the minimum. A good RSS reader is worth a lot more than $9 a year to some people.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

I like this :)

I don't want to differentiate people who can't pay.

fady• 13 years ago

i like this idea vs "pro"

vec• 13 years ago

Yeah, but we're all geeks here. It can't be that hard to splice together some custom CSS to make hacker news look like whatever you want. Let me just click view source and OH GOD PG FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WHY ARE YOU USING NESTED TABLES IT'S 2013!!?!?!!111questionmark!

Sorry, blacked out for a minute there.

krapp• 13 years ago

You'd think a site called Hacker News would be more hackable...

dicroce• 13 years ago

Maybe they're so l33t they've wrapped around, and thats why they're using tables...

leoplct• 13 years ago

ahhahahahahha! You're funny

leeoniya• 13 years ago

been there, tried that. ended up just using some basic css rules to keep it from crawling apart to 1080p :(

  @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
  @-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") {
    body > center > table {max-width: 960px;}
    .default {padding-right: 22px;}
    textarea {width: 100%;}
    form {padding-right: 18px;}
  }

= less eye strain

whytables• 13 years ago

Actually this has been asked here before and pg himself did answer the question [1] (you may have to scroll a little to see pg's response). pg also argues in one of his essays [2] that tables are the (lisp) lists of html, being very dynamic and flexible which is perfect for explanatory programming despite being unclear (in its purpose/structure) sometimes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100460 [2] http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html

bconway• 13 years ago

Please. Make it a paid service and charge $9/month, not year.

xtracto• 13 years ago

I agree with this. PLEASE make a paid version, otherwise your project will end in the same place where all those other free RSS readers ended: in archive.org

The problem with these kind of services is that if they are free, a lot of people won't pay for them and might use so many resources that the money paid by the few people who donated or paid will not be enough to sustain the service.

Sorry for the tone, but I am so tired of seeing lots of mini-web services turned off because they were free... Nowadays I downloaded Vizzy for Mac: although it is not the most pretty RSS reader, I know it will be working forever.

austenallred• 13 years ago

Hats off for the notification that popped up as I was trying to import telling me that HN traffic bogged you down. That was very classily and well done.

madsushi• 13 years ago

Definitely made the difference between "not loading, closing the tab" to "wow, that was awesome, I will gladly wait and see where this goes".

saulrh• 13 years ago

For me, it wasn't just that it popped up a notification, it's that hitting the arrow on the popup gives you a reply-to window with the text of the notification already filled in. Really made me feel welcome.

dwwoelfel• 13 years ago

It looks like she's using http://intercom.io for the notifications. We use them at http://circleci.com and they've been hugely valuable for getting feedback.

kar1181• 13 years ago

Import doesn't work, but the notification system is very sweet and unexpected. Can't wait to try this out with all my feeds. So far none of the 'son of reader' offerings have really done it for me.

hudo• 13 years ago

nice job! but, i went to http://yoleoreader.com/account, there's a box for entering credit card. On page without ssl ...

luv2code4• 13 years ago

the credit card information is transmitted to stripe over SSL. It looks fine.

bob_loblaw• 13 years ago

Is there a way to add folders so that I can keep my feeds organized?

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

I'm going to be deploying this very soon.

jamesbritt4• 13 years ago

I signed in/up using Google, and it's busy importing my feeds right now, and they appear to be going into folders.

I don't see a way to arrange the folders though, which would be a big plus. If I can force an order through some naming convention that's OK too.

jamesbritt4• 13 years ago

Just a follow-up. A day has passed and the import looks stalled. I'll keep checking for the next few days.

Aldo_MX• 13 years ago

"Yo leo" in Spanish means "I read", I don't know if this is a coincidence :).

rschmitty• 13 years ago

as long as it's not a play on YOLO :P

bajsejohannes• 13 years ago

Would be cool if I could add a bunch of feeds at once, so I can migrate more easily from a non-google reader.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

I did make the feed adding as streamlined as I could. However, I realize that it does pause for 5 seconds after adding the feed.

<a> -> enter url -> <enter> should be all that's needed to add a feed.

bliker2• 13 years ago

It looks nice, but I personally prefer more readable font. Source Sans looks gorgeous, but maybe use 400 instead 300 on body text. Or use darker color.

usefulcat• 13 years ago

Noticed a minor error on the front page: "consider making an donation".

bliker2• 13 years ago

I just realized that I can't export my feeds from feedly. Please somebody say I am wrong

davidjohnstone2• 13 years ago

It looks nice, and at this point in time, this is what I'll probably be using next month.

A few things:

* Is there a way to scroll through all items in the same way that Google Reader does, rather than having to go to the next item by clicking (or hitting "j")? Feeds with lots of images suffer from the current approach, since there's a delay when each item is loaded (preloading them, say, five items in advance works well).

* Hitting keyboard controls like "j" when Firefox's "search when you start typing" is turned on doesn't work. I think you need to return false in the keypress event handler (or whichever one it is).

* I would suggest changing the body font to black with a weight of 400. I have Source Sans Pro installed, and at 300 #606060 it's too light (in both senses of the word). It looks nice enough, but the main purpose of this is for reading, so using the most legible font possible should be a priority. (Tip: 15px Arial looks a lot nicer than 16px, IMHO. It's what I was using when I made 90% of a feed reader.)

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

* Yep, just hold "n" or "space" and you'll scroll through the articles * I'll look into that. * I'll try to gather some more feedback to what people think about the font. Perhaps it would make sense for this to be configurable.

Casperin• 13 years ago

I agree on the font-weight. Go for legibility first and beauty second. Personally I prefer 16px myriad pro.

Love it though! Will definitely use :)

jaredandrews• 13 years ago

This looks pretty cool. Is there a example instance set up anywhere so I can see what it is like without signing up?

booruguru• 13 years ago

I added my first subscription just fine, but subsequent attempts have given me error messages.

1) URLs that should work with autodiscovery give me this message -> "Sorry, that does not look like a valid URL".

2) When I enter the full URL of the feed it appears to add the subscription successfully, but it doesn't show up when I refresh my screen.

3) The keyboard navigation is a bit weird. If "J" advances to the next item, should the previous letter "H" send me to the previous item (as opposed to "K")?

4) I don't see how I can manually create folders for my subscriptions.

5) I can't rename subscription titles.

Yoleo looks promising, but it feels like a beta product.

sjs382• 13 years ago

3) The keyboard navigation is a bit weird. If "J" advances to the next item, should the previous letter "H" send me to the previous item (as opposed to "K")?

No. It inherits this behavior from Google Reader, which inherits this from vi. http://www.catonmat.net/blog/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys...

fooyc• 13 years ago

Finally an RSS reader that does just what you would expect from an RSS reader, and that does it well.

This may be the first real Google Reader alternative I've seen so far.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Thanks so much!! <3

DanBlake• 13 years ago

Most important question: How often do you check for new content? A RSS feed reader is useless to me if you will only check my feeds once a day for new content. Bare minimum reall needs to be once every 30 minutes for me to consider it.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Right now it's every 20 minutes. If I get enough donations I can reduce this by adding a few more servers to the parsing farm :)

shadowcats4• 13 years ago

PLEASE charge $30+ per year for this, so I can use it and not have to worry if it's going to be taken down due to lack of funds later on.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

LOL, if only you weren't the minority! If you would like to donate more, just let me know and I can manually adjust your account. Perhaps I should make the donation amount variable starting at $9/yr.

shadowcats4• 13 years ago

I mean, if Google thought running a free RSS reader was too expensive, imagine the headache it can cause you if/when this gets really popular.

Seriously, I admire your willingness to give something great away for free, but I also think you need to think about recouping your expenses and making your service financially sustainable for the long haul.

shadowcats4• 13 years ago

I think you ought to listen to this :)

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-...

The host is our own patio11 here at HN.

shadowcats4• 13 years ago

Oh, one more thing: consider adding Bitcoin/Litecoin as a donation option. Might be a good way to get some extra PR buzz going :)

tocomment• 13 years ago

How did you make it beautiful? Just good design skills?

saurabhnanda3• 13 years ago

Just signed up. It's been importing from Google Reader for the last 20mins or so. Is it supposed to take that long?

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Yep, sorry about that. The importer is currently working like crazy on all the imports from this HN post :p

saurabhnanda3• 13 years ago

I signed up last night and checked again this morning. Still importing. Are you sure the backend processes are crashing under the HN load?

decklin• 13 years ago

I did not sign in with Google, but the import page still says "Importing…" without any action on my part. Will there be an option to manually upload a list of feeds?

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

You'll be prompted to authorize when your place in the queue is up. The importer queue is insanely busy right now so it'll be a little while.

jimbobimbo• 13 years ago

Any chance to have OPML import? Will definitely remove a lot of load off of the Google importer.

squidi• 13 years ago

The text says "You can safely navigate away from this page while your feeds are being imported " so it's confusing some of us who have not initiated an import.

Good luck with it!

publicfig• 13 years ago

I have the same problem as well. I didn't really want to create the account from my Google Account but would still like to import my feeds from Google Reader. If I click import it just hangs on the "Importing" page, which is odd as there is nothing to import.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

It's mentioned a few times on this thread...the importer is just really busy and you'll be prompted for auth as soon as your turn is up.

Fuzzwah• 13 years ago

I'm unable to add rss feeds from yahoo pipes. Here is an example feed:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=fb09cb3a62553d0f06...

It is the most simple of my yahoo pipes rss feeds (I use pipes a heap), it just kicks out the current #1 here on hackernews.

I've never had any problems putting my pipes feeds into other rss readers.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

I'll look into this. I had to restart after upping some connection limits which may have been when you were adding your feeds.

Yep, just tested and that feed you mentioned can be added.

camero• 13 years ago

I'm just getting a blank white page...

yafujifide• 13 years ago

Looks like an awesome service... I need a replacement for Google Reader so I'll try this one out. Also, please consider accepting bitcoin so I can pay without revealing my private credit card information.

Update: I am trying it out right now and I've noticed it's taking quite a long time to load my Google Reader profile. My Reader profile is absolutely enormous - hundreds of blogs and thousands upon thousands of read and unread posts. It took about 10 minutes to load a single blog. This is going to take a while.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

Or for ironic fun, accept Google Wallet XD

This looks great, gonna give it a try. It's simple, and that's harder to do well.

programminggeek• 13 years ago

Looks cool, I would pay for it, please just charge and don't pretend it's a donation.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

I'm not pretending. You can use it for free if you can't afford it :)

mdesq• 13 years ago

And my expected shortcuts work out of the box. Brilliant. My import isn't even finished and I'm liking it.

msutherl• 13 years ago

#YOLEO

daturkel• 13 years ago

What does Yoleo have to offer that feedly doesn't? Is there a mobile app in the works (or at least a mobile stylesheet)?

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

I feel that the interface is more performant and more to the point of focusing on reading your articles.

chudi• 13 years ago

Hi, nice reader!! I like the pun of I read as the name of the site.

Nice template, really good work!

taylorbuley• 13 years ago

For those sin pistas, "yo leo" is Spanish for "I read."

jacquesgt• 13 years ago

I created a new account and didn't use the option to sign in with my Google account. The importer didn't ask me to sign in with my Google account, but is happily waiting for feeds to import from Google Reader. Surely it isn't able to do that without me authorizing it first?

Also, are there any plans for mobile apps? If yes, please tell me that you're going to charge for them.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Once your spot is up in the queue, you'll be prompted to import.

Semiapies• 13 years ago

Just going to second or third the mobile interest. Half or more of the time I look at my feeds, it's on a phone or tablet.

aioprisan• 13 years ago

can you please make this open source?

mrec• 13 years ago

Looks very nice, but there's no mention of what to me is the #1 requirement for a Reader replacement: the ability to export your data. Ideally, the ability to export your data in the same format that Reader does, given that all the apps pitching to replace Reader can import that.

This isn't specific to Yoleo; nobody seems to be implementing this, and it doesn't show up on the comparison summaries that pop up here on HN from time to time. There's no way all the current contenders are going to last; why isn't everyone jittery?

davexunit• 13 years ago

Why so many proprietary, web-based RSS readers? There are plenty of free readers so it's silly to get locked-in to yet another web-based RSS reader that will shut down some day.

rednukleus• 13 years ago

I need an RSS reader that works and syncs across my Linux laptop, Windows 8 desktop, Android phone and Windows XP work computer (and I can't install any software on the work computer).

frozenport2• 13 years ago

Yolo Reader

luv2code4• 13 years ago

Jamie, I am getting about 10 errors a second in my console:

  Uncaught TypeError: Object sufio._xdWatchInFlight(); has no method 'apply' reader-29b4dd587f1ca6b5f0d639aac64ce9bf.js:1 e.(anonymous function) reader-29b4dd587f1ca6b5f0d639aac64ce9bf.js:1

Pretty print the error location from chrome:

  e.setInterval = function() {
        var e = t.call(arguments, 0), n = e[0];
        return e[0] = function() {
            try {
                n.apply(this, arguments)
  Uncaught TypeError: Object sufio._xdWatchInFlight(); has no method 'apply' (repeated 1589 times)
            } catch (e) {
                throw TraceKit.report(e), e
            }
        }, r.apply(this, e)
    }

The proxy at my work doesn't allow web sockets, and I think this might be related.

Also, I noticed that there are at least 3 different third party services being called (superfish, pusherapp and intercom). All of these are ancillary to the main functionality, right?

I haven't even got my feeds imported yet, and the app is already pulling down 2 MB. superfish in particular is super heavy. I think I would prefer a lighter payload.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Superfish? I'm not even using superfish. Intercom is so users can contact me and pusher is so I can push you new entries without requiring a reload.

luv2code4• 13 years ago

yikes. It was a browser extension that uses superfish to inject ads. the extension allows you to disable this feature, but it still pulls in superfish. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/orbvious-interest/...

I removed the extension and the payload is more like 1MB. Still seems hefty but not as much of a concern to me.

I also noticed that content wasn't gzipped. should be a simple matter to add that to nginx.

mrcasual• 13 years ago

What Pusher plan are you subscribed to and how's that working out considering the spike in traffic/simultaneous users?

jff• 13 years ago

Why does everything have to be described as "beautiful"? Yes, it looks nice. It's not fucking Beethoven, it's a website that appears to do a damn fine job of managing RSS feeds. Yet every damn day we see another HN front-page article about such-and-such a "beautiful" web-app.

Edit: also, in this instance, a good chunk of the beautiful design seems to have been lifted from Google's style, from the icon style to the way they put a little red bar next to the current selection

dylangs1030• 13 years ago

It's a good way to say, "Hey, not only did I develop this cool thing, I designed this cool thing."

Also, sometimes design is a focal point. All things being equal, I will choose the prettier option. I might even be persuaded to pay money for a prettier option if it functions just as well as the ugly open source option.

GardenHose• 13 years ago

As will many. There's many powerful apps on the AppStores that are outshined by their prettier (and less capable) cousins.

mustefaj2• 13 years ago

As a heads up, designed by @mustefaj

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Beautiful is not just in the design, I've put a lot of effort into the mechanics of how things work, as well.

c0mpute• 13 years ago

+1 times 100 at least.

The time and effort that goes into making something simple and easy is enormous. Very nice product!

jessm• 13 years ago

Interaction design is the mechanics of how things work :)

masukomi• 13 years ago

While i agree that beautiful does come in no small part from the "mechanics of how things work" there's NO WAY TO KNOW that you've done that from the site. It's a static screenshot. To be honest the screenshot's a bit... simple and plain. Not terribly notable. Maybe it is a "beautiful" experience to use it, but I've got no way of knowing that without signing up for it. What's my incentive here? Why should I bother with yours when all i see is a simple screenshot with NO indication of ANY notable functionality or mechanics?

brown9-2• 13 years ago

These "beautiful" labels are also a little hard to take since they always seem to come from the creator of the darned thing, a source that's a bit biased.

webwanderings• 13 years ago

When it comes to RSS reading, its all in the UI: how it is setup and how well one adjust to such an interface. As far as I am concerned, I cropped-up my own [1] and I am happy with the solution so far.

[1] http://web-wanderings.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-no-coding-requi...

seany• 13 years ago

How what kind of backlog will it keep for unread items? It's not that weird for me to not pay attention to a feed or collection of feeds that I don't have time for at the moment. This is one of my main issues with newsblur, which has a ridiculously low limit of 500 per feed max (based on the number of subscribers the feed has), if you aren't a paying member and it's a low subscription feed it could be as low as 25 posts or something.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Right now, the backlog is infinite, and I'd like to keep it that way if I can.

Flimm• 13 years ago

Consider using Mozilla Persona to handle authentication. It's easier to implement that rolling your own username/password solution (although I see you've already done that), and it's decentralised unlike using Google credentials.

unicornporn2• 13 years ago

So, many people have already had the time to switch from Google Reader. That means people have to be able to import feeds by OPML. Right now it seems like Google Reader is the only import option. There seems to be https, that is very nice. But theoldreader.com offers me this too. I need an import option before trying this out.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

OPML is certainly coming, next week I hope :)

grimman• 13 years ago

Do consider sending out an announcement mail when you do. As it stands I'm content (but not happy) using another RSS reader. I'm not actively looking, but a good replacement would be wonderful indeed. As such, your reader runs the risk of being forgotten during the wait, which would definitely be a shame.

That said, sending unsolicited mails... you know the dilemma here.

unicornporn2• 13 years ago

Nice, looking forward to trying it out!

jamesbritt4• 13 years ago

Very cool. I sign in/up using my Google account, and the import is chugging along.

One of the things a liked about Reader was that I could get a very simple, compact, list of feed headlines, making it easy to scan through a large number of items to pick out the few that might be of interest. A good RSS read helps me get through a lot of data without having to step through every item or go through pages with only a handful of items showing on each.

I did not see a way to get such a layout in Yoleo. Are simple, compact title list views possible, or planned?

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

I think something like this, a "compact" view, makes a lot of sense. Perhaps something called "Headline Mode", which may be in the books :)

jamesbritt4• 13 years ago

Thanks, that would be fantastic. As it is now, though, I really can't see myself using it because it would take me a week to scan through my feeds.

Props on the work you've done, though.

bdellovibrio• 13 years ago

Does it have nested folders? That would be very helpful for my feeds (scientific journals).

jongraehl2• 13 years ago

It's doing a fine job replacing Google Reader for me (I was otherwise going to use Feedly, who require me to learn a different UI).

Are you already using your own backend? It seems so, since it's showing me different articles and not sync read status from Google Reader (which seems to show new content sooner).

What's the meaning of the orange circle empty/filled?

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Yep, I'm using a backend I've written for the application. An API will be released soon, as well. Orange circle empty == read, filled in == unread.

jongraehl2• 13 years ago

thanks; thought it might be that, but it wasn't updating immediately for me. pref for page-through without reading to bottom = read?

also, i can't figure out how to add a new or existing feed to a folder. the tags i had from google reader are still there.

Savid• 13 years ago

I'm liking it for my simple needs. I have a bigger screen (1440p), any chance of getting the article to be wider than 610px?

motyard• 13 years ago

Loving it. Thanks.

presty• 13 years ago

what is the backend stack for this? looking at your github, I assume it's using rails?

stevewillows• 13 years ago

On a desktop it has a decent experience, but on my phone (S3 in 'tablet mode') it's unusable. Any chance for a mobile friendly version?

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Most definitely :) Soon!

shubhamgoel• 13 years ago

Come on.. import already! I am excited.

jamiebikies43• 13 years ago

Sorrrrry, there are SO many people in line. It's chugging away fast now. I've made some performance improvements to the importer.

BruceLi• 13 years ago

looks good but is slow and not very friendly to me.

hablahaha2• 13 years ago

Anyone else reading this in their mind as YOLO reader?

frozenport2• 13 years ago

Yes, but are the 4 letters considered intellectual property?

hablahaha2• 13 years ago

Well... you only live once, so you know, infringe whenever possible.

dombili• 13 years ago

Love this. Couple of suggestions:

- Please add folder support.

- I'm sure the text look beautiful on Macs, but it's not easy to read my feeds with that grey-ish text on Windows. Can't you make the text a bit bolder or darker?

- It's obvious you spend a lot of time working on this so I'd hate to see it closing because you couldn't afford to pay for your servers. I don't think asking for a donation is a good idea. Make it something like a $1-2/monthly subscription with a full month free trial. That way you may lose some customers, but your servers wouldn't be as busy as it appears to be now and you'd have a -sorta- fixed income and wouldn't worry about the future.

- An instapaper support would be great.

- I agree with other people here. That red looks beautiful but it's distracting when you're reading. Maybe tone it down a bit, or let us choose the color/background etc? Tha'd be a killer feature.

Best of luck!

JustMadMike• 13 years ago

Very nice, I'd love to be able to group my subscriptions in folders. Even better if I can navigate through all feeds in a folder combined instead of through individual feeds.

darklajid• 13 years ago

I signed up and like it - after Google Reader died (and, to be honest, a while before that) I haven't used RSS much and just had a saved set of tabs that I religiously opened to waste away my time. This might .. help. Thanks!

Unrelated: I'd really be interested in a follow-up story/post from you about the load you're experiencing. You just pushed a free [1] service in front of HN. How's the thing holding up? Both code/stack and allocated hardware? I guess it boils down to general curiosity on the one hand, the question of whether you can do this in a sustainable fashion on the other hand.

1: with donations

tatarak• 13 years ago

looks great! couple of notes:

- the red buttons sometimes gets broken for me on Chrome (27) - the text on them is either invisible (log in on the main page) or messed up (one letter over another)

- text is rendered poorly on Chrome and Opera, probably a fault of the browser+font combination, maybe you can try to experiment with different fonts

- did you think about something different than read/unread model? it was something that was irking me about Google Reader or now with Netvibes - the point of RSS reader is not to read it all, at least not when you have thousands of items to read

czzarr• 13 years ago

looks really good, definitely going to try it out in the next couple of weeks

tucosan• 13 years ago

I really like the cleanliness of your layout. But I find the color scheme rather annoying. The choice to use red for headlines is a pretty bad decision (sorry), I can only recommend you tone it down a bit or even chose a completely different color scheme. At least give us the option to change the colours ourselves. Otherwise, great effort!

gorbachev• 13 years ago

This is yet another RSS reader that doesn't understand how power users use RSS readers.

The information density is WAY too low.

It would take me forever to browse through my feeds using your interface.

The reason why I like (and still use) Google Reader is because it packs the most number of posts of any RSS reader on a single page and makes it easy to scroll for more.

Google Reader is "glancable". Yoleo is not.

Otherwise Yoleo looks pretty ok. Design is clear and the icons look good, and it's simple to use.

However, the "glancability" issue completely kills it for me.

Show HN: Yoleo – A Beautiful RSS Reader

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